ALL EARS: McDermott lays down sentence after sentence with a musician’s ear for timing, rhythm, and sonority.
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In an otherwise omnivorous reading life, I suffer a fear of the family saga — those sweeping, multi-generational novels that march across the tapestry of history and show the effects of time on a diverse cast of characters. Alice McDermott’s sixth novel fits this description while stretching well beyond it.
Yes, After This could be adapted as a made-for-TV mini-series — but then you’d miss out on what makes the book so great. The author of Charming Billy, which won the 1998 National Book Award, At Weddings and Wakes, and Child of My Heart, McDermott lays down sentence after sentence with a musician’s ear for timing, rhythm, and sound. Set in the nexus of Long Island and New York’s outer boroughs, her novels feature middle-class Irish-American Catholics confronting ordinary circumstances transformed into extraordinary moments of pain, beauty, and humor.
There’s nothing remarkable about the Keane family. In the 1950s, John and Mary meet, wed, and produce four children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Clare. They settle on suburban Long Island, attend Mass together, and live the sort of productive, prosperous lives characteristic of post-war America. St. Gabriel’s must build a new church and gym for its school. As he sits in a planning meeting, John Keane ponders the nature of faith. “Man is immortal . . . or he is not. And if he is, there’s the whole question of whom you pray to. If he’s not, then prayer is wishful thinking. You either pray to the dead or you don’t. But the real question before them this winter evening . . . was far simpler: Could they break ground in the spring?”
McDermott’s characters contemplate the big questions and moral dilemmas of life — but they don’t float in the æther for long before returning to earth in refreshingly human ways. Jacob considers his new Capri: “The puzzle he had studied in high-school religion classes — why the rich were so ungenerous, why the suffering of the poor, the fixable suffering, was so seldom fixed — began to solve itself for him the first time he drove off alone, in his own car. There was want, as the Brothers of St. Sebastian’s had referred to it. But then there was, he suddenly understood — alone, unfettered, pressing the accelerator, palming the wheel — I want.”
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As the novel enters the 1960s and ’70s, the Keanes bump up against change. Jacob goes to Vietnam. Michael engages in a lot of hanging out and casual sex. Annie accompanies a friend to an abortion clinic — all expected signs of the times. Then Clare finds herself pregnant at 17. The novel ends with her wedding, which will take place in the no-longer-new church with its dated “circus-tent ceiling.” As he goes about his preparations for the ceremony, the priest reflects on other, more recent changes: parishioners’ requests for realistic statues of saints and the comforting familiarity of the old confessional screens. He “knew immediately, as if he had never understood it before, what his parishioners were lonesome for, in this monstrosity of his. It was not the future they’d been objecting to, but the loss of the past.”
After seeing her family weather the storm of so much change, Clare is also ready for a return to tradition. Far from unhappy, she embraces the prospect of living with her parents until she and her husband are ready to begin on their own. It’s easy to imagine their lives being something like John and Mary’s — a return to the past that brings After This full circle with a grace and wry understanding that, at the heart of life, some things never change.
After This | By Alice McDermott | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 288 pages | $24
Alice McDermott | Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass Ave, Cambridge | October 12 @ 6:30 pm | 800.542.READ